If the Right’s disinformation schemes are notable for their audaciousness, the Left’s are characterized by their subtlety.
Over two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana recently purported to bring America the first two stories of women who have been killed by post-Roe restrictions on abortion.
In the first instance, Amber Nicole Thurman found herself in dire need of medical attention after taking abortion pills in the summer of 2022. The pills, which abortion advocates insist are safe and effective, succeeded in ending the life of Thurman’s unborn twins. They did not, however, expel all of the fetal tissue from her body, resulting in an infection that would eventually claim her life.
For 20 hours after she arrived in the hospital seeking treatment for that infection, staff dithered and failed to treat Thurman. Surana observed that she was “in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.”
“But just that summer,” she lamented in the third paragraph of one article, “her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.”
This was not true when it was written, and at this point, ProPublica’s refusal to issue a correction makes it a lie. D&Cs are not illegal in the state of Georgia, abortions performed after an unborn child has a detectable heartbeat, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother, are. Abortion is defined by Georgia as “the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.” The law also clarifies that “any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion [miscarriage].”
Surana uses the reference to miscarriage to suggest that there was ambiguity as to whether doctors could act to save Thurman’s life, but both the fact pattern and law are clear: Thurman’s unborn children had already expired, so there was no legal explanation for the hospital’s failure to perform a D&C. Indeed, even if they had still been alive, the law is explicit about the fact that abortions are permitted when in a physician’s “reasonable medical judgment,” a “medical emergency exists.”
An abortion wasn’t the life-saving medical care that she was in need of — it was an abortion that made her have need of life-saving care.
What’s more is that there is, by Surana’s own admission, no evidence to suggest that Georgia’s abortion law was what stopped Thurman’s physicians from removing the fetal tissue before it was too late. After spending almost 60 paragraphs implying as much anyway, she dropped this bomb: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.”
In other words: The hospital was free to act, and there isn’t so much as a hint that the state’s limits on abortion were responsible for Thurman’s death. The suggestion otherwise is a fiction born entirely of ProPublica’s desire to use a tragedy to advance a political narrative.
That same, erroneous narrative was also advanced in a second article, this one about 41-year-old Candi Miller’s death in the fall of 2022.
Miller’s pregnancy was not without risks given her age and preexisting conditions. She suffered from lupus, diabetes, and hypertension. But once again, it was not her pregnancy but the abortion pills she took to end it that wreaked havoc on her body and led to her death.
As in Thurman’s case, the pills ended the life growing inside of her but failed to expel the fetal remains from her uterus. In her last days, the pain was so great that she turned to “a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl,” which killed her in her bed at home.
Miller should have sought treatment for the pain at a hospital, where she was entitled to care that likely would have saved her life. But she didn’t seek it for fear of being punished for her abortion. “If you get caught trying to do anything to get rid of the baby, you get jail time for that,” Miller’s son told Surana.
You can’t, though. Although some abortion advocates have long used the boogeyman of women being imprisoned for abortion to argue against any restrictions at all on the practice, this is not a risk in Georgia. In fact, both Planned Parenthood and pro-life legal experts agree: State law does not provide for any legal penalties against women who seek abortion after the six-week gestational limit.
Once again, it was abortion itself, and disinformation peddled largely by pro-choice activists, rather than the state’s restrictions on the practice that condemned a woman to her death. Any plain reading of the information gathered by Surana, though not her editorializing, makes that much clear.
And yet it is the editorializing that has been mindlessly parroted by her peers.
On CNN, Kate Bolduan went even further than Surana had, bizarrely declaring that Thurman and Miller were “denied life-saving care that they needed” before introducing an editor from ProPublica and lavishing the outlet’s reporting as “deeply sourced and researched.”
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell also made the mistake of not just touting the poorly presented, error-addled story but misrepresenting it.
Discussing Thurman’s case, O’Donnell insisted that her doctors “felt legally compelled to just watch as her blood pressure dropped” and “believed they were handcuffed by the Republican men in Georgia,” even though Surana herself admitted that her reporting in search of such evidence came up empty.
In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg cried, “It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone.” And over at New York Magazine, Sarah Jones claimed that Thurman “would be alive today if it weren’t for anti-abortion Republicans in Georgia” and repeated the false claim that Georgia had “made it a felony to perform D&Cs.”
“When abortion bans kill, they reveal their true purpose: to grant a handful of extremists power over the lives and deaths of American women. Women aren’t human beings to these extremists; to them, there is nothing real about female suffering,” Jones raged with unrighteous indignation.
How is it that some of the most influential, well-compensated journalists in the world could, with the blessing of the prestigious, resource-rich organizations they work for, fail their audiences so fully and propagate a lie so far? Aren’t these the same people and mastheads who spend an inordinate amount of time warning about “disinformation” and its perilous consequences for big-D Democracy? Aren’t they the same ones who wax poetic about the virtues of journalists and their vital role in preserving big-D Democracy?
What this episode exposes is that much of that talk is a branding exercise rather than the manifestation of genuine concern or fidelity to the truth.
With less than two months to go until Election Day, abortion is widely viewed as one of the most, if not the single most, favorable issues for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris & Co. have, with good reason, made pro-choice advocacy the centerpiece of their campaigns. Even the most avowed pro-lifers admit that the post-Roe political landscape has been unkind to them, and the Democrats are fighting an uphill battle on the other issues voters identify as being most important to them — immigration, inflation, and national security among them.
It should come as no surprise that Harris spends so much time talking about abortion or that she was quick to promote ProPublica’s deeply flawed reporting. But the press’s decision to do the very same thing instead of debunking it is evidence of rot so deep as to be incurable.
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The lies told by former President Donald Trump and his followers that these same voices decry — “The 2020 election was stolen! They’re eating the pets in Springfield!” — may be dangerous for the paths they lead those who believe them down. But they are also so cartoonish as to be dismissed by a majority of voters and face the headwinds of a media already inclined to treat him harshly.
What makes the Left’s more clever lies so dangerous is that they not only have real, life-or-death consequences but that they are so readily accepted and amplified by their shamefully reflexive allies in the Fourth Estate.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and Robert Novak fellow at the Fund for American Studies.